Over00 » Game marketinghttp://www.over00.com
Solo game dev thoughtsFri, 31 Jul 2015 15:16:36 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.1A peek behind the curtain or how you almost heard about my gamehttp://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2896?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=heres-why-you-dont-know-about-my-game
http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2896#commentsMon, 22 Jun 2015 20:11:52 +0000http://www.over00.com/?p=2896With my last post about my disappointment of my results in Steam Summer Sale there were a few people surprised that they didn’t know about my game and recommended that I do a better job at PR. They’re right, one can always do better. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say that I reached the top level of PR handling so I can always do better.

But what I detected while reading this is that many people assume I didn’t do a thing. I agree, there are a thousand things I could probably have tried but it still doesn’t mean I haven’t done anything. I might sound on the defensive here but my goal here is to show you that sometimes even when you try you don’t get any results … and that more rarely it’s possible to not do anything but still get results.

Preparing the release of Human Extinction Simulator

To prepare the release of HES I first did a pre-order run, contacted the press about it and sent review copies to YouTubers with smaller audience. Why not contact the big players right away? Well the game was in beta and unless you’ve been in Early Access on Steam for quite some time your chances to have a YouTuber with a million subscribers to review your beta is close to none. Beside, if bugs were to pop during the video than it was giving me a chance to fix them before showing the game to a bigger audience.

My plan worked to some extent with YouTubers but the answer from the press was quite weak. The biggest website that published the story was Rock, Paper, Shotgun and it didn’t create much of a wave. Still I was relatively happy because I still had much work to do and didn’t have yet all the proper material for a big press round.

Unexpected email

A few days before the release, it was finally time to remove the dust of my big list of persons to contact and send pre-release access Steam keys. Think of any big YouTubers, I contacted them. Think of any popular websites, I contacted them too. I’m pretty sure I got everything covered in English at least. As I was doing this, the game was already listed in the upcoming releases on Steam.

So as I was contacting all these people (often personalizing some emails I felt could benefit from it) I received an email that caught my attention. Someone named Cristian Baltoc was asking me for a Steam key for a YouTube channel, TotalBiscuit. Yeah right, good one. When you release a game on Steam you receive an incredible amount of requests for Steam keys from people pretending to be YouTubers with a big audience so I thought it was quite foolish to try to impersonate that one in particular. But wait … A quick search on Twitter and then I saw this email was legit! https://twitter.com/mrcamel101/status/552904004527607808

Just to make sure I confirmed with other people and yes it was true. TotalBiscuit wanted a Steam key! I quickly replied and then soon on Twitter I saw this:

Holy … I’m not sure what kind of effect a video from him could have had on the sales of the game but I was pretty sure that this was a nice thing to have. Maybe the other YouTubers who ignored my emails would then take a second look at it, maybe it’d get the press to be more inclined to write about the game. I have no idea but I’m sure it’s better than nothing.

And then nothing came … except a terrible day-one bug

The game got released on Steam and then people started to post that they were unable to launch it. It was crashing on the loading screen. At first I thought it might be an isolated event due to some weird PC configuration as I never experienced it on the 2 machines I tested it and nobody who played the beta (all pre-orders were getting access to the beta), heck even the few YouTubers who covered the game during the beta never reported that problem.

I have no one else than me to blame for this but it really caught me by surprise that such issue never popped over a year of development and testing. I was still unable to experience the problem on my own machines (it was specific to PC with many screen resolution possibilities, so read “good gaming machines” here, the ones YouTubers are probably using …) so I quickly tried to get information from those experiencing it. Thanks to these helpful players I finally found and fix the bug … a week later. The harm was done though.

Did TotalBiscuit didn’t covered the game because of that bug? It’s quite possible. I can imagine he receives a ton of games each day so a game that doesn’t launch must not be high on his priority list. I of course recontacted all YouTubers once the bug was fixed to hope they’d give me a second chance but I knew I was probably grasping at straws here. I needed to at least give it a try but most likely it was vain.

Or maybe he just didn’t like the game, maybe it wasn’t good “video material” or maybe he just didn’t have an opinion about it. The same can be said about all the others I contacted but I did felt very bad about that missed opportunity with TotalBiscuit as he’s the one who came to me and not the other way around like in every other case. It was like I was given a chance to go to Disney World but missed the flight because I woke up late that morning.

Now the million dollars question is “could this missed opportunity have made a huge different overall?”. I don’t know how different it could be but I know it’d be different at least a bit. At least a tiny little. Maybe by now I would have sold 1,000 copies of HES instead of half of that. Maybe I’m underestimating the effect but what you need to understand is that 1,000 sales at full-price in 6 months would have been a pretty big deal to me. I don’t even dare wondering what an optimist scenario would be like.

So close but still a million miles away

You can do your best, you can improve yourself each time you do stuff but you can still miss opportunities. It’s partly because of that you don’t know about my game. And it’s not only that missed opportunity with TotalBiscuit but all the others I reached out to and failed to get their attention.

What’s sad and funny at the same time is that I could have NOT send any email, sit on my ass all day long not trying to get the word out, get contacted by TotalBiscuit without even reaching to him like he did and then (let’s flip history here) see my game covered by him. Why is it sad and funny? If the TotalBiscuit video would have become reality my results could have been better with me not doing anything compared to what I got by trying to reach out.

Funny eh?

But the bright side here is that I’m not done. I’m still making games and new opportunities will present themselves. Let’s just hope the next time I’m able to profit from them.

]]>http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2896/feed0Win some, lose many more – Reaching out to the presshttp://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2704?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=win-some-lose-many-more-reaching-out-to-the-press
http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2704#commentsMon, 22 Dec 2014 19:20:55 +0000http://www.over00.com/?p=2704I stopped counting the number of emails I sent to the press a long time ago. Same for YouTubers. The ratio of emails sent / answers received is terrible and in many case the exposure gained from these efforts was also terrible.

But even with poor results I keep going at it because I live in constant fear of not doing absolutely everything I can to spread word about Human Extinction Simulator. My biggest failure of 2014 when it comes to this matter is to not have been able to get in touch with any YouTuber with at least 10,000 subscribers. To be fair though, most of them rarely cover games in beta so I find some comfort in this and I have so far 2 persons in that category who told me they should be checking the game once it’s released.

The proper pitch came late

I struggled to pitch the game properly for a long time. I was putting too much emphasis on “turn-based” and “strategy” which are extremely generic and boring terms.

I also wasted a lot of time trying to squeeze a “story” in there but it would appear that for this kind of game people couldn’t care less about it. I tried to make a “funny” twist with the name saying that in the “lore” of the game its true name was “Halting Extraterrestrials Strategy” but got renamed to Human Extinction Simulator because it was showing nothing good about the fate of humanity but that joke fell flat.

I started to get slightly better results when I started to put emphasis on the main point that makes the game different from others which is its main mechanic. To help people figuring out why the game is different and interesting now I just say that “it has a chess-like mechanic for space battles”. With only these few words it seems my message is heard better and people reviewing the game are now using these words to describe the game.

This pitch is leaving a lot out and might not be totally accurate but it sets the tone and immediately set the game apart from the many other space games (and there are many of them). It’s short, easy to remember and does a good job at slapping a distinct label on the game.

The right logo also came late

It’s stupid but just until a few days ago the logo had no spaceships in it … This might explain why the game was thought by some to be some kind of epidemic game like Plague Inc.

I thought the logo was fine at first but when browsing Greenlight I came to the conclusion that it was terribly wrong. Sure, maybe it was pretty but it wasn’t communicating anything relevant about the game. When you have only a split second to have people notice your game the logo needs to do a really great job.

BEFORE

AFTER

The new logo immediately tells you that it’s about spaceships and not some virus. Now that I see this I really have no idea why I didn’t add this right from the start. It’s hard to evaluate how it hurt my promotional efforts but I know for sure that the old logo didn’t helped.

If only I had that logo when I first posted the game on Greenlight when the game gets the most exposure maybe it would have done better during that period. Confusion must be avoided at all cost and I did a really bad job there. It’s fixed now but it doesn’t matter much when it comes to the traffic Greenlight is driving itself to the page. If I don’t tweet or post about it I’m lucky if I get 4-5 views per day.

Even when you win, you don’t win much

Having your game featured in an article on RPS do generate traffic, votes and sales but it’s not as impressive as you would think it is. When a small channel on YouTube covers the game I don’t notice any effect hence the importance of being able to reach out to more popular channels.

It ends up being a lot of work for very little results but that’s still better than nothing at all. The same can be said about Twitter and other social media. To hope getting a dozen of clicks on your link you need thousands of impressions so finding different ways of generating traffic (like a post on Gamasutra for example) is of importance. Just posting “Please vote for my game on Greenlight” day after day just won’t do any good and you’re just annoying people after some time.

So when you know all of this it’s easy to give up and say that it doesn’t matter. It’s a very tough road to get everything “right”, to be ignored 95% of the time and when you do get attention not getting much out of it.

]]>http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2704/feed1Building an audience as an unknown indie game devhttp://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2690?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=building-an-audience-as-an-unknown-indie-game-dev
http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2690#commentsSat, 13 Dec 2014 18:44:34 +0000http://www.over00.com/?p=2690I’m constantly baffled by how many indie devs posting games on Greenlight are not doing anything to build their audience outside of Steam. It’s not like there’s a lack of “you should do this or that” posts addressed to indies out there. Yet, many of them help propagating the “I just need to get on Steam and I’ll get rich” stereotype I constantly have to fight against. The moment I tell people I want my game on Steam they think I’m not doing anything else …

What baffles me even more is that a lot (a lot) of these games posted on Greenlight have already passed the process while not doing much outside of Greenlight but that’s something for another post.

If like me you’re in it for the long haul you won’t be happy with just having your game pass Greenlight. You first want people to know they can buy your game directly from you and hopefully they will subscribe to your newsletter so you can slowly make things “easier” for the future. It’s a long and tedious process though. Here are some thoughts about it.

It starts with the “right” games

This is the most frustrating part. Ideas don’t grow in trees and ideas you can complete and release are even more rare. You have to deal with whatever idea you have. Just saying something like “make a game as interesting as FTL, Banished or Braid” won’t make an idea magically appear. It’s always easier to say “oh I could have made that game myself” but then why didn’t you? Exactly, because you didn’t thought about it. Simple as that.

You can come up with a perfectly enjoyable game, nicely polished and only receive good comments about it but if it doesn’t have “that special touch” then it can easily fall completely off the radar. Sometimes people are not even trying really hard to promote their game but because it’s so “special” or different it seems to do the job more or less by itself.

Waiting for “that” special game won’t do any good. The only thing to do is to work on a title, complete it and release it. Once you’re done you move on to the next project.

I can relate to that with my game Bret Airborne. Even if yes it could be better in some ways I have yet to hear someone telling me “it’s a terrible game”. Critics are all good to great but the game just didn’t found an audience. It’s a good game but not special enough to help all the efforts I made to promote it.

There’s nothing unimportant

Unless you have a crystal ball and can predict the future you can’t really overlook anything. It’s way too easy to say things like “I don’t have much followers on Twitter so it’s not worth it to post at least one screenshot a week”. You have absolutely no idea who might end up seeing that screenshot, that tweet or that post on your blog.

Sure, 99% of the time you won’t see any results. You’re doing it for that 1% that matters. It’s better to try something and know that it doesn’t work than not doing anything and wonder if it would have made any difference.

Some might argue that you must be wise on how you invest your time but to know how to invest your time properly you must first see for yourself what this means.

For example I’ve been told by some people that they rarely get any press coverage and that it doesn’t produce much result anyway. It’d be easy for me to give up on that based on this comment but it turns out that I’ve been able to get some press coverage and that yes it did have a positive impact in my case. Maybe the person who told me that has 10,000 persons subscribed to his newsletter but me I have 100. If press coverage gets me 20 more subscribers it’s an increase of 20% right there. You have to start somewhere so nothing is not worth it until you say so yourself.

Dig! The information you are looking for is out there!

I swear there are days I feel like I’m the only one who knows how to use Google or other similar tools. Let’s say you want to get Greenlight votes for your game. Did you know that Twitter has a search engine?! Just by doing more or less regular search on Twitter for the words greenlight and Steam I was able to book an hour-long interview. Without that search I wouldn’t even know there was such opportunity.

Are you wondering who might be your best bet to have your game appear on PC Gamer, IGN or Kotaku? Find a game you know has been covered in the past and share some elements with yours and Google “[game name] review”. In just a fraction of seconds you’ll find a list of persons to contact that maybe will raise your chances of being covered. It’s not a guarantee but it’s still better than to send an email to the generic news@domainname.com address.

The same goes for YouTube. You can email a hundred YouTubers with 100,000 subscribers but if they only do Minecraft videos then you are probably wasting your time. Look for those who are playing games similar to yours. That person you found only has 100 followers? So what! How many followers do you have? If the answer is as many or less than don’t dismiss that person too quickly.

Interaction

You read a negative article about a game in the same genre as yours? How about contacting the author of that article to mention that your game doesn’t have the flaws of the game in that article! Someone just posted a video featuring a game you never heard about before then why not immediately reach out to that person. Maybe the next obscure game that person will talk about will be yours.

It’s really hard to make a cold pitch to someone you don’t know so when you see a way to link your pitch to something the person you are contacting can relate to then you should jump on it. It’s often a shot in the dark that don’t get you anywhere but from time to time it actually works. If you’re struggling to get the word out about your work you can surely afford to take some time to try this.

Nothing happens if you don’t try

The point is that you have to at least try. I’m the first one being frustrated from the many things I try that don’t get me any results but at least my conscience is clear and from time to time it do works.

You’ll notice that I’m NOT saying that doing the stuff I wrote here will give you results. I’m saying that MAYBE it will. Maybe only 5% of the things I try are getting me any actual results but without doing 100% of the efforts I wouldn’t get that 5%. If you don’t need that 5% then good for you but for many of us these little victories are what slowly building our audience.

]]>http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2690/feed1That scary feeling when you hear about a game for the first timehttp://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2665?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=that-scary-feeling-when-you-hear-about-a-game-for-the-first-time
http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2665#commentsSun, 30 Nov 2014 17:06:26 +0000http://www.over00.com/?p=2665I just found out that there was a game named The Marvellous Miss Take and it’s scary. The game came out on November 20th and I never heard about it before seeing the big ad on RPS.

It’s scary as this looks like a nice and interesting game, the devs seem to have some budget (that big ad on RPS is worth some $$$), it has a publisher and yet I just found out about it! Just now, 10 days after it’s been released. Before that I had no idea it was coming.

Okay so maybe I don’t read every gaming websites but I rarely miss the kind of games that can afford to pay for a big ad on RPS … As an indie dev, the only thought that comes to mind is “now imagine how many people will never hear about my game”.

I don’t need that everyone on Earth hear about my game to achieve some form of success but these little stories about a great looking game that completely fell off your radar reminds you how difficult it can be to get your game in front of people and even more people willing to buy it.

I don’t know if the devs/publisher thought they had a rough time promoting the game or if I just really miss everything about it but one thing that bugs me with this game is that 10 days after release it’s already 50% off on Steam … Now that’s really sad. Is this a desperate attempt to get more attention? I don’t know as I learned about the game from an ad and not the Steam sales … At least the ad worked …

I can guarantee you that HES won’t be 50% off after 10 days. That’s the kind of discount that can only make sense when the game doesn’t sell much anymore and a not so great release doesn’t qualify as “doesn’t sell much anymore” …

]]>http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2665/feed0The various types of game trailershttp://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2659?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-various-types-of-game-trailers
http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2659#commentsSun, 23 Nov 2014 23:13:40 +0000http://www.over00.com/?p=2659I already know that one of the negative point I’ll write in the post-mortem of Human Extinction Simulator will be about its trailer. It’s a mix of not being great at this (I do hope I’m getting better with time but eh …), having my computer crash every 20 minutes when I’m trying to build it, the lack of budget and the fact that it’s terribly hard to make a turn-based game look exciting in a 1 minute video. Have you ever watched someone else playing Civilization? Great game but terribly boring to watch if you’re not the one playing.

So what could be my options here to make a better trailer? Let’s look at different approaches.

Cinematic trailers

CCP is quite gifted to create amazing trailers filled with excitement to sell a game that couldn’t be more boring to most people. Showing how the game is played would probably confuse most people and it’d be terrible to sell how exciting this universe can be to its players.

So CCP is smart and focus on how the game is perceived instead of how it really looks. They are showing how the game is perceived in the collective imagination and not what it actually feels like when you are playing. Nobody is interested to see a trailer in which the player spends half his time checking an Excel spreadsheet …

This kind of trailer would work well for HES as I could focus on the idea of what the game feels like instead of showing relatively boring turn-based action. The problem of course is that it’s way too much expensive for what I can afford.

There are of course other ways to create a cinematic trailer with a more reasonable budget. Take this one for example:

It’s a great way to communicate the idea of the game without showing much of the game itself (in the first half at least). That approach could be within my reach but for best results you probably have to hire someone who actually knows what he’s doing so it means at least $1,000 and over. That’s unfortunately currently out of my reach but with an actual budget this might be the way to go.

Straight gameplay trailers

This couldn’t be more simpler and it’s quite efficient. The thing here however is that the concept of FTL is so powerful that it really doesn’t need more than that but that’s not within the reach of all games.

FTL isn’t flashy, the gameplay shown is borderline terribly boring but the reason the trailer succeeds here all lies in “Become the captain of your own starship” line. Right there you get a lot of people excited and we’re not paying attention to how the graphics look anymore. The concept is so powerful that all you have to do is to show that yes, you’re the captain of your own starship in this game.

To be successful with such trailer you really need to make sure that the concept of your game is powerful enough to carry it and very few games are in this category. Because of that FTL can get away with a very ordinary trailer.

The story trailer

That’s trying to explain the concept through a short story and hope that your story is good enough to get people to check the game. That’s what I “tried” to do with my first trailer though I did have to use gameplay bits that I think did a bad job at what I was trying to accomplish. Here’s the latest Civilization game trailer and the first HES trailer right after.

I guess I really shouldn’t put my trailer next to that but that’s still what I was trying to achieve here. I don’t think I did a good job with this one. It shows the game but now that I look at it again it’s really not clear what kind of game it is. The “story” I tried to write is terrible and kinda fails to bring any hype to the game.

The “no need to really show the game” trailers

Sometimes you might have concept that really distinguish itself but showing the game in a trailer would still end up in something terribly boring. Yes, cinematic trailers do that but they still pretend that what you see is the game. The EVE trailer above is telling you that when you’re playing the game this could possibly look like this.

Let’s check an example to help make my point

This is my favorite trailer in the list. Yes, there are parts of the interface presented here but if you have never seen a screenshot of the game then you could easily be fooled that the graphics used in it were just for the trailer. It also does a magnificent job at communicating what kind of game that weird beast is. All of that without showing the actual game.

Now I’m sure this must have costed quite some money to have such quality trailer but that’s definitely a model I’d like to be able to emulate later.

The “look, they say it’s a good game” trailer

That’s the model I went with for the 2nd trailer. It’s still not some work of art but at least I’m not ashamed of it. Having the quotes from people who reviewed the game tells more about the game than the gameplay bits themselves.

We often see this model for movies the week after their release. It’s really a ridiculous model when all you’re able to put in it is “thumbs up!” or “5 starts our of 5″. This is just stupid. hopefully here I’ve been able to pick comments about the game that really gives an honest look into it and that do a bit more than just “this is a fun game”.

Final thoughts

I’m sure I’ve left out some type of trailers so feel free to mention them in the comments. I think it’s a fascinating subject to analyze but I also hope that I’ll be able to afford someone to handle this for my next game and that I will never have to deal with it ever!

We can’t be good at everything and making a good trailer is definitely not a skill I enjoy to improve …

]]>http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2659/feed3How Not To Get Your Game Reviewed – The other sidehttp://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2655?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-not-to-get-your-game-reviewed-the-other-side
http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2655#commentsSun, 23 Nov 2014 07:43:36 +0000http://www.over00.com/?p=2655So once again we are blessed with advice from the Internet in this article titled “How Not To Get Your Game Reviewed“. I’m not saying there’s not something good to get out of this but as always be careful when reading these “advice”.

#10 – I see plenty of Kickstarter getting covered and often what the real game might be in the end is shady at best. It’s not uncommon to see a Kickstarter getting coverage with only concept art …

#9 – Tricky. I have used to generic form, the personalized form, the humorous form, the really short form and all of these can get good result based on who you are writing to. Fun fact: Some people do like generic stuff as they can copy/paste it and it makes their job easier. “Generic marketing speak” do work sometimes.

#8 – It’s so subjective … Some people have higher requirements than others. I sure had my fair share of coverage out of bad emails. What can I say. You learn when you do it. The author here just use an easy excuse that can be applied to any kind of email based on who read it. Different people, different requirements.

#7 – Here the author is just dishonest. The name of the point is “Your game is boring” yet he talks about having your game ready before talking about it. Two different things. Just look around, we see half-finished, very buggy projects covered all the time.

#6 – Again this depends on who you are contacting. I made fun some months ago about writers looking for “stories” instead of “games”. When writing to these people (assuming you can identify who is looking for a story and who is only looking to copy/paste info about your game) it might actually be good to write 1,000 words. The trick is all in how you write it and that’s a very complex skill to master.

#5 – I’ll give that one to the author. Coming up with a single sentence that catch attention is a big thing. Something that hopefully can’t be apply to any other similar game. Me I recently decided to go with “easy to learn, difficult to master chess-like space battles”. It really doesn’t tell a lot about the game yet it says everything you need to know to decide if you want to dig further.

#4 – I don’t get this point. Reviewers are very busy as the author is saying so sometimes making quick comparisons can help the person you are writing to. For example if I write “Zombie FTL-like” then the author can immediately make a link to FTL and if he enjoyed this game it might just be thing that gets him to dig further. Of course, the example the author gives should indeed never be used. Never put Minecraft in your emails. This game is an anomaly.

#3 – There’s a whole feature about Early Access games on RPS … Prison architect and many others were covered even if they were still very buggy and incomplete.

#2 – You don’t stop after 2 emails. I mentioned more than once on this blog how it took me 3 emails to get Bret Airborne covered on RPS. The author himself mentioned that reviewers are busy and get many emails so my tip here is to yes wait maybe 2 weeks between emails, try a different approach, be nice just like the author tells you but keep emailing. If the person you are trying to contact tells you “stop spamming me” then you stop. There was this talk from a successful indie on Gamasutra that was saying exactly that. Send an email then another and another and another and then another. Remain polite, trying different things but don’t stop after just 2 emails …

But again maybe some people do find this annoying but if they don’t want to cover your game after 2 emails I fail to see how it can hurt to send them more emails …

#1 – Okay, that advice is a good one. I did my homework in the past and I like to think that it paid off. Check what each writers like and target the right person. Avoid when possible generic emails like “tip@wereviewgames.com”. Those are terrible and you never know how to address your email correctly. Contact forms are the worst. When possible, try to find a direct email and even try to find the real name of the person you are writing. For some reasons some people (often YouTubers) don’t ever mention their real names anywhere. It makes really weird emails when you start with “Hi [insert nickname here]” …

#0 – Sometimes you can do everything wrong but for some reason it still works (mostly your game really is amazing) so don’t pay too much attention to “top 10 lists of things to do or not to do”. This post here is included in my warning. Don’t take my words for granted. Figure what works for you.

]]>http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2655/feed2Managing your indie #gamedev expectations and setting an objectivehttp://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2650?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=managing-your-indie-gamedev-expectations-and-setting-an-objective
http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2650#commentsSat, 22 Nov 2014 18:49:50 +0000http://www.over00.com/?p=2650A tough thing to ask indies is that they see their journey in game development as a marathon when what we keep seeing day after day are sprinters occupying 90% of the press space. It can be difficult but that’s the only way to be able to continue working when things don’t quite go the way you were hoping they’d go.

I’ve been obsessing a bit recently over how little progress Human Extinction Simulator is making on Greenlight and some people might think I’m delusional a bit about what I’m expecting from making it on Steam one day. Well I’m not and here’s why and how I managed my expectations and set an objective for HES when it comes to how many copies I want to sell in the first month.

Previous release

I’m lucky as I released a previous PC game named Bret Airborne. That gives me something to manage my expectations.

So far I sold 3,816 copies of Bret Airborne since its release 1 year and a half ago. Out of these 3,816 copies though I only sold 32 at full price (24 directly on my website, 8 on macgamestore.com and all of this in the first month after release) and everything else were copies sold in bundles … No need to say that the result of selling 3,816 copies here is far from the $30,528 I would have made if all these copies would have been sold at full price directly on my own website …

It’s still not that bad as it was a first I was at least able to pay the cost of the game with money made from bundles (though there wasn’t much left after that) and the game isn’t on Steam (also stuck in Greenlight limbo).

So I have at least one first objective here and that’s to sell 3,816 copies in a year without considering where I’m selling these copies and how much money I make out of this.

Newsletter factor

I honestly don’t know why I didn’t start my newsletter when I released Bret Airborne but that’s something I fixed for Human Extinction Simulator. It’s mostly an effort for long-term objectives but it will still play a role for HES. With a bit more than 90 subscribers so far I sold 10 pre-orders from that newsletter. When the game is officially released I’m hoping to add 10 more sales from the newsletter itself.

But wait, that’d be a 22% conversion rate!?!? When comparing stats with others, nobody achieves this but you must remember here that people signing up for the newsletter are doing so for HES specifically. This is what got them to sign-up. I’m sure that for my next game and the one after that the conversion rate will dramatically decrease. People might decide to keep receiving news from me out of curiosity but it will be for games they might not be interested in.

So with the newsletter only I think it’s not too crazy to assume that I will at least sell as many copies as I did directly with Bret Airborne. I’m already half-way there so yeah, not too crazy.

Press presence

It’s terribly difficult to occupy some space in the press but so far I’m already doing better than what I did with Bret Airborne which should mean that a few more people are aware HES exists compared to Bret Airborne. It’s tricky to draw conclusions based on this but let’s look at the numbers a bit.

So far the video from various YouTubers have accumulated 444 views. That’s really not a lot but that’s 444 more than Bret Airborne … The two articles on RPS brought 863 persons to the game’s website. A Reddit post brought 435 persons and the press release about the pre-order of the game on wargamer.com brought 304.

I’ll just consider these numbers as they are the biggest peaks of traffic so that’s a total of at least 2,046 persons that heard about the game at some point. In reality that’s way more than that but I’m trying to come up with a reasonable objective here.

So I was able to reach through the press at least 2,046 persons before the game is released so I’m setting myself an objective of reaching 2,500 persons through the press and YouTubers once I release the game. Why 500 more? Well some YouTubers already told me they are interested to cover the game but only when it’s released so I’m hoping I can do better then. If I can convert 1% of these 2,500 persons into sales that gives 25 additional copies sold. Why 1%? It just seems like a reasonable objective. I’m not trying to predict the future here, I’m only setting objectives.

The Steam effect

I have no games on Steam currently so here I’ll use the post-mortem of Super Win the Game which was described as a not so successful release on Steam. Why? Simply because the data is available and it’s a game I never heard about before reading the post-mortem so it seems like a possible “worst case” scenario I can use to set an objective (again, not predicting the future but setting an objective).

That game sold 900 copies on Steam in the first month. Let’s say I’m ambitious here so I’ll raise this to 1,000 copies for my own release on Steam.

Compiling everything

Let’s put everything together now.

Bret Airborne data: 32 copies

Newsletter: 20 copies

Press presence: 25 copies

Steam: 1,000 copies

So for the first month after I release HES my objective is to sell 1,077 copies at full-price. Now you might question my math and my theories but it’s all about setting an objective. To be honest, 1,077 copies ain’t all that fancy and that surely won’t allow me to quit my day job but if I can achieve this it will be the best I ever done so far. I’m sure many indies would call that a failure if they’d get these numbers. For me that’d be a great success. It will beat by miles what I have achieved by selling 3,816 copies of Bret Airborne mostly through bundles.

The question now is how can I try to achieve this objective. Simply by jumping on every opportunity I get to spread the word about the game. This means sending a 4th and 5th email to YouTubers once the game is released, doing another press-release, writing many more emails to the press, possibly working on a new and better trailer, reaching out to people I haven’t reached out to so far, etc.

Basically it’s doing stuff I didn’t quite do for Bret Airborne. I have no way to predict if it will actually give the results I’m hoping for but at least now I have an objective I can work toward.

Maybe some of you will think it’s an incredibly pessimist objective and others will say that I’m just pulling numbers out of nowhere. In all cases that’d still be the best I ever done and it never was about trying to predict the future. It’s a way to keep me motivated and measure in some way the progress I make as an indie dev.

]]>http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2650/feed0Guerilla marketing – How the press can be easily fooled sometimeshttp://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2647?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=guerilla-marketing-how-the-press-can-be-easily-fooled-sometimes
http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2647#commentsTue, 18 Nov 2014 18:12:41 +0000http://www.over00.com/?p=264711 bit studios recently posted 10 Steam keys of their newest game This War of Mine on The Pirate Bay and it didn’t took long for some of the press to quickly turn this small investment into precious additional visibility.

Giving away 10 copies of your game will hardly fix any piracy issue. It’s a brilliant marketing stunt and Polygon fell right into the trap as well as many of the people commenting. The intentions of 11 bits studio are irrelevant as obviously nothing will change about piracy here. They simply found a cheap way to get their game talked about once more.

People pirating games can say whatever they like about why they do this but the truth is that they do this because they can and it’s easy. For 1 person having some philosophical reason why they pirate games there are a thousand others who just do it because “eh, free game!”.

When reading the comments related to this stunt it’s interesting to see how it subtly it put in oppositions devs posting free Steam keys on The Pirate Bay against those who doesn’t. This proves how brilliant this stunt is. It puts 11 bits studio in the “good guys” clan and all they had to do was to post 10 Steam keys which represents nothing considering how well the game seemed to sell before this story came out.

I probably gave away more than 10 free copies of Bret Airborne when I released it but my mistakes were to not do this on The Pirate Bay, not claim it had anything to do with pirates and to not warn the press about it. Because of these mistakes I failed to promote myself as a “sympathetic dev” even if I did the exact same thing as 11 bits studio which is simply posting a few keys on the Internet. So don’t try to read too much into this …

]]>http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2647/feed0Getting attention – What worked and what didn’t so farhttp://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2637?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=getting-attention-what-worked-and-what-didnt-so-far
http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2637#commentsSun, 16 Nov 2014 23:15:49 +0000http://www.over00.com/?p=2637Twitter : Not great

Twitter doesn’t quite work. At least, it’s far from any expectations I had. I already talked about it but I think it’s worth repeating as I’m not the only one that came to that conclusion.

Interesting fact: writing a tweet that gets retweeted ten thousand times does NOT translate into more new followers. https://t.co/3cdEGD1WHW

It’s still worth to put some time in it because you do get some very minor results (so better than nothing) but don’t hope too much from it.

When people are following 1,000+ people, your tweet you put so much thoughts to write properly will be barely be viewed by anyone. The trick would be to make something that goes viral somehow while still communicating your message.

Personalized emails : Not great

I’ve spent so much time writing those and got next to nothing from it and what I got I really have no idea if the personalized email was really the cause. Again, it’s worth doing in some specific case but don’t waste your time doing it for everyone you are contacting unless you can really afford the time.

I recently posted a press release on gamespress.com and some websites that ignored me with nice emails have posted the generic press release. Lesson learned here: provide to the person you’re writing to something to copy/paste. If you do personalize the email still provide something generic that can be easily reused by them.

Press releases : Work badly but amazingly easy to do

Really. Just Google for some example from an indie game that did well, follow it and the send it to gamespress.com. That’s the easiest visibility you’ll ever get. Oh it might not be great but considering how easy it is to do it’s totally worth it.

Facebook : Where do I get followers?

I just cannot get up the number of people following the Facebook page. It’s advertised everywhere, I always make sure to include a link in my communications yet it doesn’t produce any results. Even so that I don’t update it as much since most people who “liked it” are people I know in real-life and probably won’t buy the game anyway.

Blogging : Now you’re talking!

Best way so far to be noticed. Not on my own blog though. When I feel I have something that might be of interest to other game devs I work on the post and then submit it to Gamasutra.

I posted 9 articles on Gamasutra and 8 of them were featured posts (meaning they appear on the front page for a few days if you’re lucky). Each time I post there I get more Twitter followers and more newsletter subscribers.

Now I have yet to post something that gets a lot of visibility (maybe I should post something controversial …) but it still works a bit every single time. It also helps to get your name out there as people might actually remember you later and making contacts is always good.

Greenlight : If I could only start over

I wish I would have waited for my game to be in pre-order before adding it to Greenlight. You get a lot of visibility in the first few days you appear on Greenlight and then you totally disappear. If you don’t bring traffic to it then nobody will even know it’s there. I think it would have done better if I waited further in the development process and maybe I could have made a few more sales in pre-order.

Yes, you can apparently post a new instance of your game but then you go back to 0 votes and Greenlight really isn’t popular right now so it’s a gamble.

Submitting early while thinking it will take some time to get approved is NOT a good strategy. Submit when you think you have all the pieces in place to maximize the effects of the first few days on the front page of Greenlight.

Final thoughts

Even when something doesn’t get you much result it’s still worth to put some time in it. Even if I’m disappointed with Twitter I still keep a presence there as it’s still better than nothing. I just don’t put too much energy because I know I can’t get much from it.

Everything counts and when you’re trying to get the wheel spinning you can’t really “not try” a bit of everything. With time you get wiser on how you are spending your time so it hopefully starts to make sense.

]]>http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2637/feed2About discounts at release …http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2603?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=about-discounts-at-release
http://www.over00.com/index.php/archives/2603#commentsSat, 18 Oct 2014 15:26:03 +0000http://www.over00.com/?p=2603Slowly but surely I’m getting closer and closer to the release of HES (though if it’d get too close of the Christmas sale of Steam I might delay it a bit …) so obviously I’m starting to think of my launch strategy. One aspect of it is the all too famous now “discount on day one”.

Without Steam I bet that 95% of games would release at full price … just like they did before in the medieval era. I’m not sure if there’s actual data to prove that releasing a game at a discounted price is really effective. Maybe at a time before Greenlight where staying in the top 10 best sellers of a category was much “easier”?

Look me in the eyes

Right now I check the popular new releases on Steam and most of them have a discount ranging from 10% up to 50% (!!!). What this listing immediately makes me notice though are the games without a discount (the same applies when looking at all new releases). They appear different in the page so my eyes immediately goes to them. All the others look the same and I have to pay attention to actually see the number in the little green discount rectangle.

So much for trying to stand out in the crowd …

At the top everywhere

Another belief to release a game at a discounted price was that by looking cheaper you get more sales and then you remain in the top 10 sellers on the front page or in a category longer so you get more sales because of that and so on.

Again I have no idea if there is any data to support this but I suspect it was a bit more true before Greenlight (or at the beginning). With the recent Steam update I must admit that I’m really discovering “new” old games I never heard about before that I will probably buy at some point. I find myself looking a lot less at the top sellers list now.

But that’s just me and I didn’t made a survey to check if it was true for others. What I know though is that if tomorrow there’s another Call of Duty released then it will be in the top sellers list easily. It might have become more difficult for indie devs simply because they have way less coverage than other games and there’s now so many of them. It’s quite possible that attention is divided just enough so we end up with only AAA games in the top sellers.

Here, take a look at the current best sellers. Maybe it’s just that no big indie titles were released recently but I wouldn’t be surprised if the top sellers list starts looking a lot more like this in the future.

So more games on Steam = harder to get in the top sellers list unless you have a good marketing budget or your title is highly expected for some reason (some games just have that little something that gets the wheel turning by itself).

So much for cumulative effects …

More units sold, more money

That … again, I have yet to hear about some data proving this … ON RELEASE of course. If you get your own “daily sale” or “weekend sale” box on the front page of Steam then yes, you’ll probably make more money than the day before at full price.

With easy access to so many cheap games do people really jump on yours because you release at -10% or -25%? Maybe before … (?) but most games now seem to launch with such discount. As observed before it doesn’t seem to put you on a more visible spot so it might only come up to “were you able somehow to get people to expect a bit your game”. Those on the verge might be convinced but then … it’s Steam. You know that at some point it will get a 50% and then a 75% discount.

My guess is that there’s a danger of cannibalizing money you were “sure” to make anyway meaning that you simply get less from people who would have bought your game anyway at full price and that you didn’t get enough traction from the discount to compensate.

If we forget about discounts a bit, the general feedback I seem to get from other devs is that higher pricing really equals more money and that aiming “low” ain’t such a good strategy. Maybe if your goal really is to build a community or gain followers (?) but … eh, that seems like a long shot. If you’re wrong about how many people you can reach on release that you’re just losing money for nothing.

So more units more money? Maybe I would have said so a few years ago but with what I hear and see now … I’m much more hesitant (but again, I’m not talking about having your big solo promo on Steam frontpage).

Conclusion

Discounts are surely good to renew interest and convince people to buy your game but at release I’m starting to think that it’s a mistake. For sure, for some established indie devs like Positech, not having a discount at release works very well. I don’t base my conclusion only on this (I’m not an established devs that people expect anything from) but mixed with my previous observations … Seems pretty solid to me.

So will I release HES at a discounted price? All signs seem to point to no. Beside, it’s already at a discounted price right now in pre-order! If you put your money together with a friend you can each get the game for $12.50 instead of $20. Almost 50%. Sure, it’s not “yet” on Steam but don’t worry, it’ll get there.

Of course you can always help to speed up the process by voting for it on Greenlight! (see box below)